Following UFC 124, AKA's Mendez admits he's just as hard-headed as Koscheck

American Kickboxing Academy trainer Javier Mendez believes Josh Koscheck fought Georges St-Pierre on pure heart after suffering a fractured orbital bone in the first round of their title fight this past Saturday at UFC 124.

Koscheck will be back to top form after a decision loss to the UFC welterweight champ, Mendez said.

But it was obviously a disappointing setback.

“That’s part of the game,” Mendez told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Somebody wins, and somebody loses. Greg Jackson got to their guy; we didn’t.”

Mendez, of course, is speaking about St-Pierre’s trainer and chief strategist, who urged the champion to stay behind the jab that wounded Koscheck early on and continued to do damage as the fight went into championship rounds.

Meanwhile, Mendez and head AKA trainer Bob Cook struggled to keep Koscheck in the fight. They screamed at him to press the action from just outside the cage but couldn’t seem to get through.

When the bout was over, Koscheck and St-Pierre embraced after a long and contentious buildup to the Dec. 11 fight, prior to which Koscheck repeatedly trashed the champion.

“He apologized to me,” St-Pierre said of the brief conversation the two shared inside the octagon. “(He said), ‘I said a lot of things. It [was] for building the fight.’ I said, ‘Thank you for coming into hostile territory to make the fight happen with all the [expletive]-talking. If I want it or not, at the end of the night, it’s only a fight.

“I need Josh Koscheck to do what I do for a living. If Josh Koscheck wasn’t there … I wouldn’t have made money, and you guys would not have a good night of entertainment. We need good guys and bad guys. It’s nothing personal. At the end of the day, it’s business.”

The AKA fighter on Sunday thanked fans for their support and said he is in Boston to undergo surgery on his orbital bone. He returns home to Fresno, Calif., shortly afterward for rest and relaxation.

Whether he returns to action with the trash talk that drove 23,000-plus Canadians mad at Montreal’s Bell Centre is anybody’s guess.

“Josh basically does what he does to drum up interest for fights,” Mendez told MMAjunkie.com. “He’s a marketing genius. Whether he does it or not in the future, I don’t know. But Josh knows how to create interest.”

Mendez, though, offers no excuses for his fighter’s performance. St-Pierre was simply the better man.

“Josh fought crappy,” he said. “He knows it. If we told him he fought great, we’d be lying. He didn’t do anything what he was supposed to do, and at the same time, Georges did.

“Josh is similar to what I was like. I never did what my coaches wanted to do; I did what I wanted to do. Some people like to guide themselves, and others like people guiding them. Let’s not discount the fact that GSP is a great fighter.”

Surprisingly, though, the trainer agrees with UFC president Dana White’s statement following UFC 124 that St-Pierre has cleaned out the welterweight division, even though he works closely with AKA fighter Jon Fitch, a fighter who’s beaten almost everyone of note with the exception of the champ.

“Sure, everybody has another opportunity to come at him because they’ve gotten better, but how can you deny the fact that he hasn’t cleaned out the division?”

Where does that leave Mendez? Back to the drawing board – and on to the next challenge: helping the rest of the AKA stable, including UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, defend his title, possibly at UFC 131 in April.

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